The War Within

As Syria descends into civil war, can its rebel factions unite against the government?

Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed as many as twenty thousand people during the war. At the funeral of a young rebel, a mourner said, “As soon as this burial is over, I am going to Aleppo to fight.”

Photographs by Moises Saman / Magnum

A few weeks ago, in a rebel headquarters near Aleppo, an officer in the Free Syrian Army showed me a map of an offensive. Traced out on paper in pen and ink, it delineated districts in the city, identifying each by a letter, which allowed the rebels to monitor their expanding turf. The officer pointed to districts C and B, and said, “Those are liberated.” Pointing to A, he said, “Half an hour ago, we reached the middle of the city, near the Citadel”—the medieval fortress that looms on a hill. I asked about district D, an area deeper in the city. “It’s still not in the hands of the F.S.A.,” he said matter-of-factly. Another chart showed where rebel groups had established themselves. “This lets us know how many are where,” he said, “and helps us to decide how much food and medicine and other supplies to send.” He smiled at the evidence of conquest and said, “It’s a good system.”

For seventeen months, President Bashar al-Assad has kept up a grinding campaign against the rebels, which has killed as many as twenty thousand of his citizens. But last month a spectacular series of events recast the pattern of the war. On July 18th, rebels bombed a regime intelligence headquarters in the capital, Damascus, killing four of the country’s senior military and intelligence officials. In the confusion, the rebels launched major offensives, taking neighborhoods in Damascus for the first time. Assad disappeared—sparking wild rumors that he had dispatched his family to Moscow and fled to the Mediterranean coast—and tens of thousands of Syrians left in a panicked exodus to neighboring countries.

In the next few days, the rebels also stormed into Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and its commercial center, pressing all the way to the walls of the Old City—a labyrinth of alleyways and narrow streets that contain ancient buildings, chic hotels, and a villa belonging to the shoe designer Christian Louboutin, a favorite of Syria’s First Lady. The Old City of Aleppo has persisted for five thousand years, but there was no guarantee that it would survive this war. In 1982, when Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, crushed an uprising in the city of Hama, as many as thirty thousand people were killed and the old town was almost completely levelled.

I drove into Aleppo on the morning of July 26th. A counterattack by the regime was imminent; according to reports, Assad had dispatched a large armored column to retake the city, and rebels to the south were attacking the troops, trying to slow them down. In an apparent effort to scare out any civilians remaining in the rebel-held districts, the regime had flown MIG fighter jets overhead, sending out sonic booms and dropping bombs. On the ride into the city, I saw that most of the traffic was going the other way: small Chinese vans, packed with people and their belongings, evacuating to the northern towns and villages.

In northeastern Aleppo, where the rebels had attacked, streets were littered with torched buses, cars, and tanks. The rebels were based in the Sheikh Najjar neighborhood, in a school that sat alongside a basketball court whose walls were decorated with large paintings of Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob SquarePants. It was a very hot day, and someone had stacked up six-packs of orange soda. The hallways and rooms were full of fighters carrying weapons, guiding bound prisoners, and conferring over plans. There were few civilians to be seen.

The leader of the rebel force, a lean, bearded figure who calls himself Haji Mara, said that he and his men were ready for Assad’s forces. “We don’t care about them,” he told me. The regime still had troops within the city, but they were too weak to strike back, he said. The rebels’ main trouble was with snipers and with the shabiha, the paramilitary civilian thugs who serve as the regime’s death squads. The shabiha, whose name derives from the Arabic word for “ghosts,” were involved in some of the conflict’s worst atrocities, including the May 25th massacre in the town of Houla, in which a hundred and eight civilians were killed, most of them women and children.

In Aleppo, the shabiha were out torturing and killing any rebels they could apprehend. But Haji Mara seemed willing to tolerate them, if they would not interfere with his cause. “We’ve told them to stay in their houses and, if they have a weapon, to put it down,” he said. “We have no quarrel with them.” At one point, a rebel handed him a cell phone, with a call from an enemy officer stuck in a police station that his men were besieging. In a carefully controlled tone, Haji Mara urged him to defect. Turning away from the mouthpiece, he whispered, “He’s afraid of the government.” To the officer, he said, “We are the government now. If you defect, you won’t be punished.”

There was a commotion just outside the office: thudding blows, a scream, and the sounds of scuffling and angry shouting. In a classroom across the hall, armed men stood guard over a group of frightened-looking prisoners sitting at children’s desks, while a man was beaten in front of them. A few minutes later, he was led out: a rebel fighter who had been arrested on suspicion of being a shabiha. He yelled with rage and fear, and another fighter, a burly, bearded man, yelled back at him. A crowd formed as the bearded man struck at the accused shabiha, who struggled to defend himself. At last, he was handcuffed and led away.

In Syria, where the President has bombed his own cities rather than relinquish power, it should shock no one that his opponents have resorted to violence. Since the beginning of the conflict, Assad’s security forces have displayed an extraordinary capacity for cruelty. The anti-regime protests began peacefully, and turned violent only after the police shot at demonstrators and tortured to death a group of adolescent protesters, returning their bodies to their families gouged with knives and, in at least one case, castrated. When Assad was accused of killing civilians, he insisted that the victims were combatants—speaking, as ever, with the flat affect of a store manager disclosing poor sales figures.

The rebels have mostly avoided harming civilians, and many of the fighters I met seemed earnestly concerned with the fate of their country. And yet a growing number of them are proving to be as capable of cruelty to their foes as the regime—which, of course, many of them fought for until just recently. The armed core of the Free Syrian Army is composed mostly of former soldiers, who describe themselves as “defectors”—one moment shooting unarmed civilian protesters on behalf of the regime, and the next shooting back at their former comrades-in-arms. [cartoon id="a16673"]

For months, policymakers and pundits have debated whether Syria was in a state of civil war. Today, it undeniably is, but not in the schoolbook sense of the phrase, with its connotation of two tidily opposed sides—Yanks and Rebs squaring off at Antietam. Instead, the war comprises a bewildering assortment of factions. Most of the rebels, like seventy-five per cent of Syria’s citizens, are Sunni Arabs, while the Assad regime is dominated by Alawites, members of a Shiite offshoot that makes up about eleven per cent of the population. But the country also has Christians of several sects, Kurds, non-Alawite Shiites, and Turkomans, along with Palestinians, Armenians, Druze, Bedouin nomads, and even some Gypsies. Each group has its own political and economic interests and traditional alliances, some of which overlap and some of which conflict. There are Kurds who are close to the regime and others who are opposed. Around the cities of Hama and Homs, the regime’s paramilitary thugs are Alawite; in Aleppo, hired Sunnis often do the dirty work.

While so far the United States and Europe have decided that the conflict is too complicated to resolve with a Libya-like mission, most countries in the region are taking sides. The Shiite-led states support the government. Three weeks after the bombing in Damascus, Assad emerged from hiding to meet with Iran’s national-security adviser, Saeed Jalili, who said, “Iran will never allow, in any form, the breaking of the axis of resistance,” referring to Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

On the other side, Sunni states back the rebels. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided weapons and cash. The Turkish Prime Minister discreetly established a border base camp for regime officers defecting to the F.S.A., and said that if Syrian forces approached the border they would be fired on. Away from the Muslim world, the conflict has been no less divisive. China has aligned itself with Assad, and so has Russia, which has a naval base in Syria and a large-scale arms arrangement with the regime. The United States is unquestionably on the side of the rebels. Obama reportedly signed a secret “finding” to provide them with covert support, and the Administration is working through intermediaries, including Turkey and the Gulf States, to establish a political plan for the country’s future. But Obama and his aides are concerned that the only goal uniting the many rebel factions is the desire to depose Assad. What will hold the country together after that common cause is gone?

The farm country to the north of Aleppo is a patchwork of towns and villages, each aligned with its own sect or ethnicity. But Sunnis dominate the region, and during the surge in July the rebels “liberated” a number of towns there. One of them was Azaz, a town of thirty-five thousand situated just a few miles from the present-day border with Turkey. For a thousand years, Azaz has been a gateway to Aleppo, and a staging ground for would-be conquerors. In 1030, it was the site of a major battle between the forces of the Byzantine emperor and those of the Mirdasid, the dynastic rulers of the province. The remains of a Bronze Age fort rise incongruously in the center of town.

I arrived in Azaz two days after the rebels took power, and signs of recent combat were everywhere. The shops were shuttered and the streets empty; electrical lines dangled from poles; houses were peppered with bullet holes and blasted by mortar shells. A handful of armed rebels stood guard in the shade of the former headquarters of Assad’s Baath Party, which was now the hub of local operations for the Free Syrian Army. The fighters were in civilian clothes but wore baseball caps adorned with the colors of the rebel flag—the closest thing they had to a uniform.

Since securing Azaz, rebel officers told me, they had dispatched some fighters to bolster their comrades’ ranks in Aleppo. The towns in the region were the main source of fighters in the city. Each had sent a handful of men, a few dozen—whoever could be spared—adding up to perhaps a few hundred fighters. In an office in the former Party headquarters, a television showed jerky news footage of the ongoing battle: rebel fighters celebrating atop a captured tank on an Aleppo street. But it was clearly going to be a hard fight. The regime’s snipers were slowing the rebels’ advance, and helicopters and warplanes were strafing and dropping bombs. The rebels seemed nervous, but they insisted that they would soon be in charge of the whole area.

During the rebels’ siege of Azaz, Assad’s forces had hunkered down to fight in a complex of buildings in the town center. They had posted snipers on the roof and on the twin minarets of a large, newly built mosque; it had been bombed, and now the façade had gaping holes several stories high. Down the street, the military-intelligence headquarters had also been bombed, and several floors had collapsed like a sandwich, spewing rubble onto the street. Inside the buildings was evidence of a desperate last stand: floors caked with spilled food and human feces, shell casings, discarded uniforms, boots, and blankets. Graffiti scrawled on the walls read, “Assad, or we burn the country,” “God for worship and Assad for leadership.”

On the roof of the mosque, rebels had installed a black flag bearing a devotional inscription. When I asked Yasir al-Haji, my Syrian guide, about it, he looked at me sharply and said, “It’s not Al Qaeda, if that’s what you’re thinking.” In recent days, there had been reports claiming that Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Syrian rebels. Yasir, a businessman in his early fifties from the nearby town of Mara, was a prominent leader of the Local Coördination Committees, the civilian support network for the uprising; a man of moderate political views, he was concerned that the reports would dissuade Westerners from aiding the cause. When the F.S.A. began to coalesce, Yasir said, it held little attraction for the conservative farmers of the area; instead, a hard-line Islamist group called Hizb ut-Tahrir had grown in influence. “At the beginning, the revolution allied with them,” Yasir explained. “But, when they tried to make it too extreme, we didn’t like that, and we told them no. So we agreed to a black flag that said simply, ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.’ ”

There was no doubt, though, that Islamist-extremist cells were active in Syria. Although their numbers were uncertain—a U.S. Administration official told me, “We’re not talking about dozens of people, nor are we talking about thousands”—they were in evidence. In Reyhanli, a town on the Turkish side of the border, I met a Syrian doctor named Ahmed, who had established a network of paramedics and a field hospital in Syria for wounded rebel fighters and civilians. With him were two brawny young men, with long, jihadi-style beards, whom he was smuggling over the border. They looked Pakistani but spoke English with a British accent, and said that they were from the United Kingdom. After I identified myself as a journalist, they abruptly left the room, insisting that Dr. Ahmed accompany them. He came back alone, and refused to answer questions about his guests, saying only that they were coming to “help Syria.”

The next night, two photographers, one Dutch and one British, vanished nearby after crossing into Syria, and word trickled out that they had been captured by foreign jihadis. After a week, the photographers escaped, with the help of F.S.A. fighters. They said that they had been handcuffed and beaten, and accused of being Western spies. Their captors, they said, were a group of several dozen foreign religious extremists, several of whom were Pakistani and spoke with British accents. [cartoon id="a16795"]

As it turned out, the group that had blown up the military-intelligence headquarters and the mosque in Azaz was also Islamist, and was headed by a man who called himself Abu Anas. Like many rebels, his men had established a base in a commandeered school—in this case, a girls’ high school in the center of town. A thin man in his twenties, with shaggy dark hair and a beard, Abu Anas wore a black Polo shirt and a holstered pistol when he received me in his office. With lilac-colored walls and salmon-pink curtains, the office was a difficult place in which to give the impression of ferocity, but Abu Anas had made a concerted effort. On a desk, he had laid a Koran and another holy book, and a sword with a battered golden scabbard, engraved with Koranic inscriptions. Behind him hung a black flag, like the one that flew on the mosque.

A young aide brought some photocopied Google Earth maps of Azaz, and Abu Anas, pointing out what had been the enemy’s key positions, explained how the rebels had taken the town. “First, we cut off their water and electricity,” he said. “Then we gradually surrounded them and shot at them and tried to get them to fire back at us until they ran out of ammunition.” The final battle had stretched for twenty-four hours, he said, and ended only when some of Assad’s soldiers began defecting. On a laptop, he showed a film clip, in which his men fired furiously at regime soldiers inside the mosque and then surged inside themselves. “We killed and captured some and some escaped,” he said. “They tried to get out of town, but we ambushed and killed most of them.” Abu Anas had taken some wounded men prisoners, but found that he didn’t have enough medicine even for his own fighters. “We couldn’t look after them, so we let them die,” he said.

Another clip showed tanks retreating from the town; one of them blew up in a great explosion. “That was my I.E.D.,” Abu Anas said proudly. “I made it, and he”—he pointed to his aide—“planted it.” The aide, I noticed, had a bandage on his hand. Abu Anas also claimed credit for the explosion that had shattered the mosque. “I did that myself,” he said. “I’m an explosives expert. The government had snipers in the minarets, and we thought it best to destroy them, in case the government came back.” When I asked how he had learned his craft, he said, “I was taught by some people—Syrians who were in Iraq and Afghanistan. The explosives are the same kind that were used to blow up American tanks.”

Other than the fact that he was born in 1987, and that he was from Idlib, a province south of Aleppo, Abu Anas refused to disclose anything about his background or about the origins of his group. “Everything before the revolution is secret,” he said. He wanted an Islamic state in Syria; he mentioned Umar ibn Abdulaziz, an eighth-century caliph, and said, “I’d like to go back to that time.” But when I asked what current Islamic states he admired he seemed at a loss. Saudi Arabia? He grimaced and shook his head. “They’re not Islamic,” he said. What about the Afghan Taliban? “I’m not sure,” he said, looking puzzled.

Abu Anas said that Islam offered a great deal to the world. He’d heard that Western powers were studying the Islamic banking system as a solution to their financial ills. But, he added sourly, “most of our countries are just dictatorships, and the leaders rule them like kings. Most of them, too, are supported by the United States. If the U.S. didn’t like them, it would have got rid of them.” He held up the Koran and the sword and declared solemnly, “We want the Islamic system. And those who only think about themselves should be killed: Bashar, Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan, the king of Saudi Arabia, and the kings of Kuwait and Morocco.” His aide added, “And also Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s leaders.”

“What about Syria’s Shiites?” I asked.

Abu Anas replied, “We’ll kill everyone who has fought against us, including Sunnis.” His aide said, “We don’t like to do this, but the government has pushed us to this position. Iran has been helping Bashar al-Assad, and so has Nasrallah”—Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader. “And the regime has armed the Alawites and Shiites against us.”

Increasingly, the question of loyalty to the regime has come down to sect affiliation: a majority of the Army’s rank-and-file soldiers are Sunni conscripts, while the commanders of the military and of the myriad intelligence agencies are Alawites. Abu Anas’s aide was a defector, having fled two months earlier. “I think eighty per cent of the soldiers in the Army would like to defect, but they’re afraid,” he said. “If they suspect you, they will kill you on the spot.” In the Army, internal-affairs agents were constantly on the lookout for potential traitors, who were often murdered to dissuade others. As a soldier, he said, he had been forced to do things that he now felt guilty about. “We would have to shell a town just to please an officer, or because it had had a demonstration. One night, we saw a house with a light on. The officer said, ‘There wasn’t a light on yesterday. Shell it.’ So we did.”

In one of Abu Anas’s film clips, his men were shown meeting up near the mosque with another column of fighters. “Those are Abu Ibrahim’s men,” he explained. There were three rebel groups operating in Azaz, each with control over a different sector of town, and although they had loosely coöperated to drive out Assad’s Army, each group appeared to keep mostly to itself. Abu Ibrahim, the leader of one of the militias, had established a base at a commandeered border post outside of Azaz, and one day I went to meet him.

If Abu Anas was a holy warrior, Abu Ibrahim resembled a mid-level Mob boss: a hulking man in his early forties, dressed in a stained T-shirt, a baseball cap, and warmup pants with a pistol shoved into the waistband. He walked with a limp; a sniper had shot him in the left calf, in one of three recent assassination attempts. When I met him, he was sitting with some of his gunmen in the customs office. The border gate, a few hundred yards off, hung open, but there was no traffic.

Abu Ibrahim was receiving a Kurdish delegation—three unarmed men in civilian clothes. One of them, a short, jowly man in his forties who said that his name was Abu Ahmed, explained that they were from Afrin, a nearby Syrian district that was populated mostly by Kurds. They had remained neutral in the conflict, but now, he said, “we know there is a revolution in Syria and we want to join this revolution.”

Abu Ibrahim waved a hand, and said, “You can join, but no drugs.” His men exchanged looks and laughed. Abu Ibrahim described himself as a “fruit merchant,” but he had a reputation as an all-purpose trader, working across a border known as a major transshipment point for Central Asian narcotics.

Abu Anas, the head of a rebel faction that helped lead the siege of Azaz. He wants to establish an Islamic state in Syria. “We’ll kill everyone who has fought against us,” he said.

The Kurds in Turkey are embroiled in a struggle to obtain an independent homeland; for years, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—a separatist group known as the P.K.K.—has fought against the Turkish Army. In recent weeks, Turkey has accused Assad of arming P.K.K. fighters in Syria, and Abu Ahmed reported the same thing. “The Army has withdrawn from our area, and has been handing weapons to the P.K.K.,” he said. Assad, he suggested, was hoping to start a conflict among the Kurds, in order to weaken a possible alliance with the rebels.

The visitors stressed that their organization was opposed to the P.K.K. “We are against them because they are with the government,” Abu Ahmed said. There were hundreds of Kurdish villages in the Afrin district, he said, and “in all of them there are people who want to join the revolution, but the P.K.K. won’t let us. So we have come to see Abu Ibrahim to see how we can join the revolution, and to see what to do after the government is overthrown.” To be able to take on the P.K.K., he and his comrades needed weapons, he said. Nodding noncommittally, Abu Ibrahim whispered to a deputy. He shook hands with the Kurds as they filed out of the room.

Abu Ibrahim turned to me, smiled broadly, and said that he wanted Syria to be a democracy, with an elected parliament and good relations with Western countries, including Israel—“as long as they return the Golan Heights.” He asked pointedly, “Why haven’t the Americans helped us?” Despite Obama’s secret “finding,” he hadn’t received any aid from the West, he told me. “Meanwhile, Bashar’s getting help from Iran, Russia, China, Iraq, and Hezbollah,” he said bitterly.

Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has referred to Assad and his officials as “comrades-in-arms,” but has stopped short of publicly offering military support. When I asked Abu Ibrahim what kind of aid the regime was receiving from Hezbollah, he ordered his fighters to leave the room. In May, he told me, his men had captured eleven Lebanese men at a checkpoint they controlled. The visitors claimed to be pilgrims, on a bus tour of Shiite holy sites in the region, but Abu Ibrahim was sure that they were Hezbollah agents; he claimed that they had bragged about it to his men, whom they mistook for Assad’s soldiers. Since then, he had kept them hidden, and their presence had done a great deal for his reputation. Before the conflict, Abu Ibrahim had been a man of undistinguished stature in the area. Now he controlled what he called “a battalion”—perhaps three hundred men. His fighters had captured most of their weapons from the Syrian Army, he said, but Qatar’s government had given him 1.3 million euros in cash, which had helped with food and medical supplies.

When I asked to see the prisoners, he said that he needed to think about it. But he pointed out that his “guests” had changed during their time with him. “They now understand better who Syria’s rebels really are,” he said. “They know that what they were told about us before was lies.”

A few days later, Abu Ibrahim received me in Azaz, in the office of the town’s former Baath Party chief, and had his guards bring in three men, dressed in casual clothes and wearing sandals. One of them, a bearded man in his late twenties, said that he was a preacher. Looking anxious, he held himself erect and said, “First, I want to say that we are not kidnapped people. We are not. We are the guests of a really great man.” Another, a sharp-eyed travel agent in his forties, said, “As God is my witness, and I repeat this, three times, I have never seen such a man as this.” Looking on, Abu Ibrahim sat back and smiled.

The rebels controlled the ground around Mara, but Assad still controlled the air. One day, driving through the countryside, Yasir and I came over a hill and saw one of the regime’s MI-24 Russian helicopters hovering. These gunships, which Assad began deploying earlier this year, can travel almost three hundred miles an hour, and are armed with rockets and heavy machine guns.

The countryside in the area is fertile, with potato and wheat fields and orchards of olives and apricots, and, even as the helicopters flew overhead, farmers drove tractors piled with produce. But it was becoming more difficult to go on with life as usual. Late one night, I was on the flat roof of a house in Mara when a shell came whistling overhead and exploded nearby. My hosts and I scrambled to the ground—the house had been rocketed and strafed several times before—and found that the shell had crashed into another house. The members of the family were all wounded, but still alive.

The shell had come from a Syrian Army Ranger base, seven miles to the southeast. The Rangers rarely ventured out, but they fired periodic volleys from inside the walls, and we often heard the thumps of the shells, like a giant hammer hitting the earth. Mostly, they aimed at targets in Aleppo, but sometimes they just fired anywhere. From the regime’s perspective, almost everywhere was now enemy territory.

The Assads’ regime has played on sectarian tensions, but its coercive power also kept conflict restrained. With the war, that stricture was loosening. “The social tapestry in northern Syria is so complex, and one of the tragedies of the conflict is the coming apart of that tapestry,” Fawaz Gerges, the director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, told me. “At the end of the war, we may see a long, drawn-out conflict between and within the factions.” With guns and fighters flowing into the area, it was risky to stand alone, and also risky to declare allegiances. Few prominent Alawites had defected to the rebel side, and Aleppo’s substantial Christian population remained cautiously neutral; Yasir spoke of trying in vain to engage with influential Christians he knew. The Shiites in the region were not affiliated with the Alawite sect, but they still had to be careful not to seem to be supporting Assad.

After the meeting in Abu Ibrahim’s office, Yasir was eager to find out where the local Kurds’ sympathies lay. He called Jamil Rahmano, a politician in the Kurdish village of Emhoush, and made arrangements for us to meet him. We drove to the village and pulled up in front of a school on the outskirts, as Rahmano had instructed; he called to say that he would be there in ten minutes. A couple of young men emerged from the walled compound of the school and, glaring suspiciously, asked who we were and where we were from. When Yasir announced our nationalities, the young men dodged out of sight and came back with pump-action shotguns. Pointing the guns, they yelled, “We don’t want America here! Get out of Syria!” Yasir re-started the car and we sped off. [cartoon id="a16936"]

A few days later, Rahmano came to see us in Mara. He made a ceremonious apology, saying that he had been delayed because he was evacuating fellow-Kurds from Aleppo. The men who had threatened us were guards tasked with the village’s defense. “They don’t represent our views,” he said. He explained that his organization was a former Syrian affiliate of the P.K.K., but he denied that it was pro-regime. “We have been with the revolution since the beginning,” he said. So would his men fight on behalf of the Free Syrian Army? “We are against Bashar al-Assad in a peaceful way,” he said. After a moment’s thought, he changed his position: “In our areas, we are armed, and we can definitely defend ourselves from the Syrian Army.”

Yasir was vexed; this kind of ambiguous talk was increasingly common in the region. Later, the U.S. Administration official explained that Rahmano’s group had been close to Assad’s regime but had recently agreed to switch sides and fight with the rebels. The alliance was marked by distrust, and was inconsistent from town to town. “We have seen this played out very differently in different places across the north,” the official said. “It all comes down to local politics.”

In the hope of deciphering the landscape, Yasir took me to see Abdul Nasser Khatib, one of the main F.S.A. commanders in Mara. A stocky man with a graying beard, he was a former interior decorator and the father of nine children. The regime was arming Kurds elsewhere, but, he said, “the Kurds around here are working with us. Because they see us winning, they see it as in their interest to do so. The Kurds, you know how they are—they always want to be with whoever is strong.”

Khatib was also suspicious of the Shiites. “I don’t trust them at all,” he said. “They’ve been isolated, and we have nothing to do with them.” But if the rebels gained power they would need to resolve these differences. “It’s a problem,” he acknowledged. “If we take Aleppo, I think they’ll come and ask for forgiveness. And that would be a good thing, because they used to do shabiha work for the regime.”

“If the Shiites don’t ask for forgiveness, what then?” I asked.

“That’s a question we’ll look into after the revolution,” Khatib said.

On July 23rd, forty-eight hours after the rebels rushed into Aleppo, their assault began to slow down. They didn’t have sufficient arms and fighters to advance while still holding the neighborhoods they had already taken, and so they dug in, focussing their attacks on police stations and other strategic targets. Meanwhile, snipers and plainclothes thugs were killing their men.

That day, Yasir and I attended a mourning ceremony in Mara for a twenty-five-year-old man named Habib al-Akramah, who had been killed in Aleppo that morning. Habib had been a taxi-driver a few days earlier, when he joined a rebel force to fight in the northeastern part of the city. Shabiha had captured Habib, tortured him to death, and hurled his body into the street, where his comrades had found him.

We arrived at the family’s house just as Habib’s body was delivered. A van pulled up, and a group of men removed the body and brought it inside, passing through a silent crowd of male friends and relatives. In a covered courtyard, they laid the body down. The body was shirtless and covered in blood; the neck was gashed below the jawline. A man lifted Habib’s belt and pointed to puncture wounds in his abdomen, making a stabbing motion to demonstrate what had happened.

Habib’s father asked plaintively, “He wasn’t an Israeli—why did they do this to him?” His brother said, “I have five more brothers. As soon as this burial is over, I am going to Aleppo to fight.” Waving to the men around him, he said, “All the people here will go, too.” In unison, they roared, “Allahu Akbar! ”

A car pulled up outside, and some men helped a stout older woman wearing a head scarf get out. It was Habib’s mother, Fatima. She dropped to the pavement, screaming. One of the men, trying to console her, said, “God is great. Consider Muhammad.”

“There is no Muhammad,” she wailed. The men lifted her up, beseeching her, but she threw herself on the ground again. It took several minutes to guide her into the house, and, by the time she reached the body, all the mourners were weeping, their anger giving way to heartbreak. Fatima sat down next to the ruined head of her dead son, and cradled it, saying over and over, “Habib, Habib, my son.”

As the rebels in Aleppo took prisoners, they sent them to be held in a high school in Mara. (Syria’s schools—sturdily built, with windows covered in wire mesh—make good jails.) I visited the new prison one evening, and was reluctantly allowed in by the man in charge, a former truck driver nicknamed Jumbo. Built like a sumo wrestler, with a beard and a pistol in a shoulder holster, he was bagging confiscated knives and guns when his guards showed me in.

Jumbo was terse and no-nonsense, a busy man. He chain-smoked cigarettes, inhaling deeply on each drag. Before taking on his present job, he had been an active rebel fighter, and had been wounded several times; he drew my hand to the back of his head to feel a bullet embedded there. He had sixty-six prisoners, he said, and there were more arriving all the time. Ten of them were thieves, and the rest were shabiha or informers. Jumbo ordered his men to bring in a couple of suspects, and a few minutes later two dishevelled men, bound and wearing bloodstained clothes, were shoved into the room.

One of the men, with a bushy beard, said that his name was Zakariyya Gazmouz, and that he was thirty-three. As I watched, Jumbo ordered that his shirt be taken off. He had tattoos all over: women’s faces, swords, eagles, a pair of tigers breathing fire. “That’s nothing,” Jumbo said. “Show them the palms of your hands.” Gazmouz’s hands, too, bore tattoos, as did his feet. In the middle of his chest were inked portraits of Assad, his late father, Hafez, and his late brother Basil, as in a holy trinity. The image of Bashar was covered with fresh gashes, as if someone had tried to obscure it; there were more slash marks all over the man’s belly, where a poem in Arabic praised Bashar and Nasrallah. “When I was in the Army, everyone loved them,” Gazmouz said. “But now I am willing to go and blow myself up to kill Bashar.” He said that his wounds were self-inflicted; he had approached the rebels in Aleppo and, to demonstrate his fealty, had offered to donate blood; instead, they had arrested him, and he had slashed himself with a razor to prove himself. He admitted that he had worked as a police informer at a bakery, helping to support a drug habit, but denied being a shabiha. Jumbo jeered at him, “Of course you’re a shabiha.” The Assad tattoos, he pointed out, were characteristic of some of the regime’s rougher loyalists. Gazmouz’s back showed the results of Jumbo’s skepticism: among other tattoos were large, angry welts, where he had been beaten. [cartoon id="a16783"]

The second man, Muhammad Shihan, said that he was thirty years old, and had been a clerk in Aleppo’s financial district until the building he worked in was blown up. While he was out of a job, the police offered to pay him to help out at one of their checkpoints in the city, and he accepted—but, he hastened to say, this had been only a month earlier. He had a gash on his nose and his right eyebrow; he said that the rebels had attacked his checkpoint, and he had “fallen down” while trying to run away. Two of his fellow-guards had been killed.

When I asked Shihan what he hoped for, he glanced at Jumbo and said, “I just want the Free Syrian Army to win. And to end this.” Jumbo ordered the suspects to be taken away, and the guards hustled them toward the door, keeping their guns trained on them. The two men began shouting hoarsely, “Long live the Free Syrian Army!,” as they were marched out of the room.

Before I left Mara, I went to the town’s cemetery for the funeral of Habib al-Akramah, the murdered rebel. The gravediggers, two young brothers, took turns in the hot midmorning sun. Because it was Ramadan, neither could have any water to drink, but they did not complain. They were earning “credit with God,” Yasir explained, adding a bleak wisecrack: “Here it costs nothing to get buried.”

Both brothers were defectors. One of them, Muhammad, a policeman, had deserted fifteen months earlier; he was still wearing a brown shirt that said “Police” in Arabic script. The other, Hussam, had defected three months earlier; he had been in the secret service, in the city of Hama, he said, and was able to escape to the north when a contact in the F.S.A. gave him a fake I.D. I asked what kinds of missions he had been on. “Burning houses, making arrests, and bringing in women to pressure the men who were believed to be in the F.S.A.,” he said.

When the grave was dug, a crowd of men and boys came walking through the cemetery. Habib’s mother, Fatima, was there, too, even though Muslim women do not traditionally attend burials. Habib was carried in a blanket slung like a stretcher between two long poles, and the men lowered his body into the grave. As they shovelled in dirt, Fatima fainted. The men chanted, “God is great, Bashar is the enemy of God.”

The phrase “enemy of God” is used with increasing frequency these days. Earlier this month, Syria’s Prime Minister, a Sunni, defected, and a week later he applied the epithet to his former boss’s regime. Fawaz Gerges, of the London School of Economics, told me he feared that the goal of ousting Assad was being overtaken by ideological and individual aims. The many factions gaining strength in Syria’s chaos—the Kurds gathering arms, the leaders of newly founded militias, the criminals, and the foreign jihadis—all have their own ends, and a unified nation may not be first among them. “The next phase is going to be the bloodiest, and it will be the war within,” Gerges said.

A week after the funeral, at Haji Mara’s headquarters in the school in Aleppo, the rebels led four prisoners out of the classroom and forced them to kneel at the foot of the wall, in front of the image of Mickey Mouse. They were former shabiha who had agreed to work with the rebels and then betrayed them, opening fire on their new allies during a raid on a police station. In the schoolyard, several of them were covered in blood; they had been badly beaten. As one of the rebels filmed with a camera phone, a half-dozen others opened fire with assault weapons. In a barrage that lasted forty-five seconds, they fired hundreds of bullets into the men’s bodies, creating such a din that other fighters shielded their ears and ran away.

Through much of the country, bloody fighting has persisted, with neither side capable of a clear victory. On August 8th, the regime began an offensive in Aleppo, and, after several days of intense shelling, the rebels retreated, to continue fighting elsewhere. A week later, a fighter jet dropped powerful bombs on a poor neighborhood in Azaz, destroying homes and killing at least forty civilians. The building where Abu Ibrahim’s Lebanese hostages were being held was destroyed, and four of them were killed. In Lebanon, their relatives retaliated by kidnapping several Syrian citizens.

Yasir called to tell me that he had visited Azaz, and had seen women and children cut to pieces—things he “never expected to see in my life.” In a shocked voice, he said, “What is Assad thinking? I don’t understand.” On August 17th, the U.N. announced that it would close its monitoring mission in Syria; after four months of fruitless efforts, there seemed no point in continuing. Edmond Mulet, the U.N.’s deputy head of peacekeeping operations, said, “It’s clear that both sides have chosen the path of war.” ♦